Cancer detection technologist Jorge Soto is developing a simple, non-invasive, open-source test for early detection of multiple forms of cancer. He demonstrated a working prototype of this cancer detection platform for the first time today on the TED stage in Brazil.

About a year ago, Jorge Soto’s aunt started suffering back pain. It was a normal injury for someone who played tennis for 30 years, but when she wasn’t feeling better after a while, doctors decided to do further tests. First they did X-rays. Then they did a biopsy. Finally, they discovered that his aunt had stage 3 lung cancer, even though she had no risk factors — this is a woman who never smoked or drank, who had been playing sports half her life. Perhaps that’s why it took almost six months to get her properly diagnosed. Does this story seem familiar? It should — one out of three people will be diagnosed with some type of cancer during their lifetime, and one out of four will die because of it, notes Soto. The process of going back again and again back for new tests, describing symptoms to different doctors, is stressful and frustrating for everyone. Yet even though we know that catching cancer early is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet against it, most of us still have to wait for symptoms to indicate that something’s wrong. Why? Because that’s the way cancer diagnosis has been done since the beginning of history. “We have 21st-century treatments and drugs, but 20th-century procedures and processes for diagnosis,” says Soto. That’s exactly what he and his team want to change.

Together with a team of scientists and technologists from Chile, Panama, Mexico, Israel and Greece, Soto has been on a journey to make cancer detection at the early stages easier, cheaper, smarter, and more accessible than ever before. Now that progress in biotech is not just being accelerated, but also democratized, Soto and his team believe they have found a reliable and accurate way of detecting several types of cancer at early stages, through a blood test detecting small molecules called microRNA. “The virus creates a unique pattern for each type of cancer. making microRNAs a perfectly, highly sensitive biomarker,” says Soto. Yet we cannot use existing DNA-based tech to detect them, because they’re much smaller than DNA.

For the first time in public, Soto demonstrates a working prototype of the early cancer detection test that he and his team have built. “Imagine that the next time you go to your doctor, a lab tech takes a few drops of blood and extracts RNA.” The tech then spreads your RNA sample across several plates, each one of which contains biochemistry markers looking for a specific RNA. Then, the plates go into a test box — in this prototype, a blue cylinder about as big as a layer cake. The tech puts the plate inside the box to be processed for a specific reaction, measuring how much and how fast each biomarker shines. The next step is to hook up a smartphone to the test box, to act as a connected computer and camera. When the test is over, the phone sends the pictures up to an online database for processing and interpretation. The final processing step compares specific microRNA and how they have reacted over time with the existing data and documentation around microRNA patterns related to certain cancers. The whole test takes about 60 minutes, allowing doctors and patients to get results in real time. Currently the entire platform is a working prototype — but it works. “This is what pancreatic cancer looks like,” says Soto in a tech demo onstage, using pre-existing data. Although the test is still in the early stages of development for broader use, so far Soto and his team have used it to successfully identify pancreatic, lung and breast cancer in humans. His end goal: a simple, non-invasive, accurate and affordable test that uses state-of-the-art microbiology and data science to tackle cancer. To bring that possibility closer, Soto and his team are making the entire design of the device open source. “Cancer detection should be democratized,” he says.

Right now cancer detection often happens at stage 3 or 4. That’s too late, and too expensive, for both families and humanity. “Today my aunt is fighting bravely, but I want fights like hers to be very rare,” says Soto. “I want to see the day when cancer is treated easily because it can be routinely diagnosed in the very early stages.” When that happens, the way we see cancer may radically change.

When TED Fellow Gabriel Barcia-Colombo saw an extraction of strawberry DNA for the first time, he was smitten. “I’d never thought about DNA being a beautiful thing before I saw it in this form,” he says in today’s talk, given at the TED Fellows Retreat.

Barcia-Colombo was inspired to join the public biotech lab Genspace, where biotechnologist Oliver Medvedik had shown him that gorgeous strawberry DNA. The two worked on extracting human DNA and, from there, Barcia-Colombo took the obvious next step: holding dinner parties dedicated toward the extraction of his friends’ DNA. (You have, too, right?)

“A lot of people, especially in the art community, don’t necessarily engage in science in this way,” Barcia-Colombo says. His artist friends were really excited about the experimentation, and he was excited about their excitement. He started collecting their DNA in little vials.

One day, it hit Barcia-Colombo that DNA’s spirals look quite like a vending machine’s coils. The synergy inspired him to create an installation piece, the DNA Vending Machine, that dispenses vials of DNA along with photo portraits of their human hosts.

To hear more about the creation of this absurdist vending machine, watch the talk above. And below, a few more creative applications for DNA.

DNA Portraits. Barcia-Colombo went human-scale with his DNA art. Nazim Ahmed and Adrian Salamunovic, on the other hand, went microscopic. Ahmed was working as a biotechnologist, and the images he had from his job sparked the duo’s imagination, as the two recount to Smithsonian.com. They swabbed their mouths, sent their DNA off to a lab, and got back digital images of the sequences, which they turned into canvas prints. Out of that whimsical move grew a business: DNA11, where you can order your very own DNA portrait..

Mixology. Why simply isolate strawberry DNA when you can isolate strawberry DNA while making a cocktail? Oliver Medvedik, the Genspace cofounder Barcia-Colombo worked with, also a TED Fellow, has a recipe that should win an award for multitasking. Read about it, and watch Medvedik’s spunky tutorial, on our blog..

Abstract Representation. What do you make of Takashi Murakami’s painting, “If the Double Helix Wakes Up…”? We love the trippy blue-and-green painting created in 2002, even if the artist hasn’t said much about what inspired it.

Stranger Visions. A hair stuck in the crack of a print hanging in her therapist’s office inspired the artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg to begin collecting genetic material while she was out and about—and then to create portraits of their owners based on the genetic codes. The images that comprise the resulting project, “Stranger Visions,” are collected on Dewey-Hagborg’s website. Read more about Dewey-Hagborg’s work on our blog, and check out the short documentary above..

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Origami. In his 2007 TED talk, Paul Rothemund explains how he makes origami out of strands of DNA — one very long, and many short — the little strands pulling the long one into a shape. Rothemund shows slides of a star, a smiley face, and even words, all made of DNA..

DIY DNA. Want to extract your own DNA? LiveScience explains that it’s really easy—you can do it with “some common kitchen ingredients”! The hardest part is swishing Gatorade in your mouth for two minutes, which, as LiveScience notes, takes a little stamina. See the full recipe here.

Have your own ideas for innovative DNA projects? Share in the comments!

What is DNA barcoding, you ask? It’s a precise way of identifying plant species using their DNA (as opposed to external characteristics that might vary from plant to plant). In this video, Ellen Jorgensen — who gave today’s TED Talk “Biohacking, you can do it too” — heads to a remote region of Alaska to collect the fragile plants found there and bring them back to her DIY biotech lab, Genspace in Brooklyn, for a crowd-sourced science project.

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“It’s a great time to be a molecular biologist,” Ellen Jorgensen says in today’s TED Talk, given at TEDGlobal 2012.

The realm of biotechnology is growing fast, she says, and advances are coming down the pipeline at a rapid clip. And yet, scientists aren’t so good at communicating to the public what is going on in biotech labs. Jorgensen wondered: could people find out for themselves?

“In 2009, I first heard about DIYbio. It’s a movement that advocates making biotechnology accessible to anyone—not just scientists and people in government labs,” explains Jorgensen. “The idea is if you open up science and allow diverse groups to participate, it can really stimulate innovation.”

Taken with the idea, Jorgensen and several friends founded Genspace, a community biotech lab in Brooklyn, New York. At Genspace, you can take classes like “Visualizing the Brain” and “Biohacker Boot Camp.” For a monthly membership fee, you can access their labs and create your own biotech projects, ranging from explorations of ancestry to art/science pieces. All around her, Jorgensen sees people discovering the wonder of science. Meanwhile, similar DIY biotech labs are popping up all across the globe.

And yet, as the press began to cover Genspace, they focused on the potential for someone to create “the next Frankenstein.” It’s a natural question upon hearing about DIY biotech labs: is there risk for biohazards at these labs?

As Jorgensen explains, of course. But she stresses that DIYbio labs work with safe organisms—not pathogens (“If you’re working with pathogens, you’re not part of the biohacker community, you’re part of bioterrorist community”)—and follow a strict code of ethics as well as local laws and regulations.

“Now you might be asking yourself, ‘What would I do in a bio lab?’” says Jorgensen. “It wasn’t that long ago we were asking, ‘What would anyone do with a personal computer?’ This is just the beginning. We’re only seeing the tip of the DNA iceberg … If everyone in this room got involved, who knows what we could do.”

To hear about some of the interesting—and hilarious—experiments being run at DIYbio labs, watch this talk. And stay tuned to the TED Blog for a stunning video of Jorgensen in Alaska, on a mission to barcode plants.